xthexder
@xthexder@l.sw0.com
- Comment on 'Reverse Solar Panel' Generates Electricity at Night 3 days ago:
I guess we’re calling geothermal energy “reverse solar” now. This is silly marketing.
- Comment on Kernel Community Drafts a Plan For Replacing Linus Torvalds 5 days ago:
fork()
- Comment on New York Startup Builds Fridge-Sized Machine That Can Turn Air Into Gasoline 1 week ago:
This machine uses 75kWh per day to make 1 gallon of gasoline. Using the cheapest electricity in the country, that’s $9.29 per gallon (+ the machine itself is $20k).
- Comment on YouTube disabled SRV3 subtitle uploads and started deleting them on existing videos 2 weeks ago:
I’m sure auto-generated captions will work great for channels like Primitive Technology where there’s no actual talking and the subtitles are describing what he’s doing…
- Comment on Wine 11 runs Windows apps in Linux and macOS better than ever 2 weeks ago:
It seems like SketchUp uses OpenGL, which should be supported just fine by a linux GPU driver. I haven’t tried it myself, but you could maybe try running it through Proton (idk if there’s a way outside of Steam?)
- Comment on Discontinuing the Teensy at Adafruit 2 weeks ago:
I didn’t even realize these were being manufactured by Sparkfun now. I’ve bought all my Teensy boards straight from the original designer: www.pjrc.com/store/ (It’s been several years since I’ve bought any parts)
- Comment on [meme] choochoo 3 weeks ago:
Do you know how many cities are out there that have completely useless public transit? I don’t think anyone’s suggesting we build a train out to every farmer’s front door so they can get into town without a car.
There’s plenty of areas where additional bus routes and train lines would be a huge benefit, but the entire budget is being spent on car infrastructure.
(Like the Premier of Ontario who wants to build a tunnel for cars under Toronto instead of finishing the light rail projects that have been under construction for over a decade) - Comment on UK Expands Online Safety Act to Mandate Preemptive Scanning of Digital Communications 3 weeks ago:
I’d also argue a human monitoring your conversation would likely make similar mistakes in judgement about what’s happening, and this kind of invasion of privacy just isn’t okay in any form. There could be whole extra conversations happening that they can’t see (like speaking IRL before sending a consentual picture).
- Comment on Mama! 3 weeks ago:
traveling at a million light-years per millisecond
You’re only off by a factor of about 30 quadrillion.
Light (famously a type of radiation), travels take 1 year to travel a light-year, hence the name.
If you want to make it sound impressive, then astronomical units aren’t the right choice. The sun is only 1 AU away from us after all.
- Comment on X pulls Grok images after UK ban threat over undress tool 3 weeks ago:
I don’t think it really matters how old the target is. Generating nude images of real people without their consent is fucked up no matter how old anyone involved is.
- Comment on The Guardian view on granting legal rights to AI: humans should not give house-room to an ill-advised debate | Editorial 3 weeks ago:
“A computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision.”
– IBM Training Manual, 1979
We’re going so backwards…
- Comment on Stack Overflow in freefall: 78 percent drop in number of questions 3 weeks ago:
- Comment on Dell says the quiet part out loud: Consumers don't actually care about AI PCs — "AI probably confuses them more than it helps them" 3 weeks ago:
The diminishing returns are kind of insane if you compare the performance and hardware requirements of a 7b and 100b model. In some cases the smaller model can even perform better because it’s more focused and won’t be as subtle about its hallucinations.
Something is going to have to fundamentally change before we see any big improvements, because I don’t see scaling it up further ever producing AGI or even solving any of the hallucinations/ logic errors it makes.In some ways it’s a bit like the Crypto blockchain speculators saying it’s going to change the world. But in reality the vast majority of applications proposed would have been better implemented with a simple centralized database.
- Comment on "Microslop" trends in backlash to Microsoft's AI obsession 4 weeks ago:
It must be hard to admit he spent billions on a slop machine. Sunk cost fallacy is probably one of many things they’re fighting.
- Comment on Grok AI still being used to digitally undress women and children despite suspension pledge 4 weeks ago:
AI Company: We added guardrails!
The guardrails: Image
- Comment on Microsoft Office has been renamed to “Microsoft 365 Copilot app” 4 weeks ago:
Well on the bright side, maybe in a few years when people search for “office software” they’ll be directed to libreoffice instead of Microsoft
- Comment on Audio dongles and the ghost of USB 1 4 weeks ago:
“High Quality Audio” in terms of the sample rate and bit depth, but considering the quality of most of these DAC/ADCs you get integrated in cables like this, I somehow doubt the data rate is actually the limiting factor on quality.
Personally I can’t tell the difference between 192kHz and 92kHz samples rates, or 16bit and 24 bit either (maybe a young kid with perfect ears could, but they’ll probably also notice background noise due to most of these using unfiltered USB power). The dongle manufacturers seem to care more about the marketing value of bigger numbers than actual usability.
- Comment on Speed test pits six generations of Windows against each other — Windows 11 placed dead last across most benchmarks, 8.1 emerges as unexpected winner in this unscientific comparison 4 weeks ago:
Well considering almost every time I reboot it seems to do a windows update, those optimizations are probably running every time anyway. It’s almost fare.
- Comment on How the AI ‘bubble’ compares to history 4 weeks ago:
It’s not actually the transistors the break down in flash memory. Flash memory works by storing charges in what is effectively a grid of capacitors, and in order for the data to remain stored, the insulating oxide layers in the cells need to be preserved. Every time a cell gets written, a charge is forced through the insulation with high voltage, and this degrades the insulation. A single flash cell might only have a few 1000 writes before this insulation goes bad and it no longer holds data. Moddern SSDs have wear levelling techniques to make the drive as a whole last longer.
Transistors on the other hand don’t have any inherent degradation that I’m aware of other than external factors like corrosion. The first thing that’s likely to die on a GPU is the electrolytic capacitors in the power filtering electronics, which have fluid in them that dries out over many years.
- Comment on Today in “Google Broke Email” 5 weeks ago:
This guy should be smart enough to realize he’s complaining about not getting free storage from Google. You can’t just run a business off other people’s infrastructure and expect it to work out without any business agreement or contract. Google Workplace is a thing, and it sounds like this guy is just cheap.
- Comment on Today in “Google Broke Email” 5 weeks ago:
I still have gmail polling my old hotmail//live addresses, and it’s been that way since the day I signed up. Back when the slogan was still “Don’t be evil”
- Comment on Article: I switched to eSIM in 2025, and I am full of regret 5 weeks ago:
What prompted you to disable your eSIM? Airplane mode works just fine on its own to temporarily disable the cellular connection, and you can turn Wifi and Bluetooth back on while in airplane mode. There’s also several settings to turn off data roaming if you were worried about accidental extra charges on your phone plan.
- Comment on Librarians Are Tired of Being Accused of Hiding Secret Books That Were Made Up by AI 5 weeks ago:
It’s always a treat to find a new Monty Python sketch. I hadn’t seen this one either and had a good laugh
- Comment on Solder-It-Yourself DDR5: Russian modders pitch the Idea of making their own RAM 5 weeks ago:
I guess in most cases a bunch of the ram used by things like Chrome isn’t being actively used, so it makes sense it’d be fine to compress. Usually you can only see one or two tabs at a time anyway. I think for some truely memory demanding tasks like compiling there’d be a pretty noticeable difference vs actually having more ram, but it’s good to know this is an option. And the SSD wear is definitely a concern with regular swap unless you go and buy some used Optane drives
- Comment on Solder-It-Yourself DDR5: Russian modders pitch the Idea of making their own RAM 5 weeks ago:
I’m assuming you’re using it as swap so you can take advantage of the compression? Sounds like there’d be a performance hit, but maybe turning half your RAM into compressed swap is better than using an SSD as swap?
- Comment on US Trade Dominance Will Soon Begin to Crack 5 weeks ago:
The worst thing about unenforced laws is their ability to be selectively enforced against only the people the government doesn’t like.
- Comment on Rob Pike Goes Nuclear over GenAI 5 weeks ago:
Thank god for his work on UTF-8 otherwise linux might be stuck with wchars like Windows >_>
- Comment on NVIDIA Puts 100-Hour Monthly Limit on All GeForce NOW Subscriptions 5 weeks ago:
The latency is way better than you’d expect, but still noticeably worse than local. I think if you’ve got a decent connection and Nvidia has a server nearby it’s about the same as 1 extra frame of lag (or playing on a TV without game mode…)
- Comment on AI-generated code contains more bugs and errors than human output 1 month ago:
I’m actually slightly impressed it got both a work program, and a different one than Wikipedia. The Wikipedia one prints “Hello, world.”
I guess there must be another program floating around the web with “Hello World!”, since there’s no chance the LLM figured it out on its own (it kinda requires specialized algorithms to do anything)
- Comment on AI-generated code contains more bugs and errors than human output 1 month ago:
Malbolge is a fun one
